Group Populations

Scholars from a number of disciplines have shown interest in the enumeration of the interest groups active in particular political systems or the numbers of associations present in a given civil society (e.g., Halpin & Jordan, 2012). Descriptive “maps” of the group population are of critical importance for a range of substantive scholarly interests and is a commodity for several adjacent research methods such as surveys, elite interviewing, and issue sampling. This map will look somewhat different depending on the research interest at stake, and researchers will have to define the limits of their population, critically assess the adequacy of data sources available, and decide upon characteristics and categories of classification.